This book focuses on a coherent representation of the main approaches to analyze the dynamics of cellular automata. Cellular automata are an inevitable tool in mathematical modeling. In contrast to classical modeling approaches as partial differential equations, cellular automata are straightforward to simulate but hard to analyze.

Are mathematical equations the best way to model nature? For many years it had been assumed that they were. But in the early 1980s, Stephen Wolfram made the radical proposal that one should instead build models that are based directly on simple computer programs. Wolfram made a detailed study of a class of such models known as cellular automata, and discovered a remarkable fact: that even when the underlying rules are very simple, the behavior they produce can be highly complex, and can mimic many features of what we see in nature.